While the dollar hits a 15 month low, and gold hits an all time high, and the editorial page editor of the Washington Post (no less) is warning:

“The bill also could take America a step closer to bankruptcy. And for progressives in particular — for those who believe that government has a mission to help the poor and protect the vulnerable — that prospect should be alarming. If federal debt continues rising on its present path, hastened by a $1 trillion health-care bill, it is the poor and vulnerable who will be most harmed.”

This is also why some political risk analysts are connecting the dots between PelosiCare and the value of the dollar:

“If the Reserve Bank of India’s directors had any doubts about the wisdom of buying 200 tonnes of IMF gold — and likely dumping some U.S. Treasuries in the process — they had only to watch last weekend’s legislative activities on Capitol Hill. The proceedings provided plenty of reassurance that the move was a smart play.

“Nothing in the healthcare reform bill that passed the House of Representatives should give investors in dollar-denominated assets any confidence that U.S. policymakers are serious about tackling the government’s structural budget deficit.”

Amazing as it is that the Washington Post would be pointing out the obvious about the Democrats $1.2 Trillion health care spending plan, since liberal and progressive news writers have given aide, comfort and a criticism-free ride for those who are doing the spending.

It is apparent that there is no amount of money too high to spend for the House Democrats on health care reform. CBO confirms the amended House bill spends $3 Trillion.

But now Fred Hiatt has really stepped over the lines — he is “calling out” President Obama for his failure to cut keep his promise about the health bill spending and the deficit.

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From the NY Post’s “Prescriptions for Disaster” — when CBO scores the first ten years of spending, then we see the true cost of the House and Senate ObamaCare bills:

“Each bill is routinely “scored” for its 10-year costs from 2010-19. Yet this includes several years when the spending wouldn’t yet have kicked in. According to the Congressional Budget Office, fully 99.9 percent of the Pelosi bill’s costs would hit from 2013 onward. Similarly, 98.3 percent of Reid’s spending would come after 2014.

“The CBO reports that, in their true first 10 years, the House bill would cost $1.8 trillion, and the Senate bill would cost $1.7 trillion. Pelosi would raise Americans’ taxes by $1.1 trillion over that period, while Reid would hike them by $1 trillion.

And the House bill would siphon about $800 billion from Medicare to spend it elsewhere, while the Senate bill would suck out about $900 billion.”

The impact on our national debt:

“And if we discount the bills’ claims to divert hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare (which is already on the edge of insolvency), the CBO says the House bill would raise our national debt by about $650 billion in its real first decade, while the Senate bill would up it by $740 billion.

So, the bills would either sock older Americans by taking huge sums of money from Medicare — or hit future generations with huge tax hikes to cover the shortfall.”

Total cost: $1.055 trillion

New Taxes: $572 billion

Cuts to Medicare: $426 billion

Not included: $247 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, pledged to be passed in a separate bill to keep this bill “revenue neutral”

Pages: 1,990

The word regulation appears in the bill 181 times.

The word fees appears in the bill 103 times.

The word tax appears in the bill 214 times.

“As we all know, nothing says ‘affordability’ like higher taxes and fees.”

The word “shall” - as in “must” or “required to” - appears over 3,000 times. “The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once.”

From Dow Jones Newswires:

“The $1.055 trillion estimate also does not include $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, which the House plans to address through separate legislation introduced Thursday.

The costs of the bill are fully offset by cuts to existing spending programs– including the Medicare?Advantage and other programs–saving $426 billion through 2019, and by tax increases raising $572 billion over that time, CBO said. In fact, the combined impact of provisions in the bill would be a net deficit reduction of $104 billion in the next decade, according to CBO.”

Politico (again) breaks a major story this morning with its outing of the Dem secret plan that Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation has been warning of for more than ten days:

a former House and Senate leadership aide sent an email sketching out another route to passage. Instead of introducing a Senate bill, Majority Leader Reid could insert the merged health care reform language into a revenue raising House bill already languishing in conference committee. The Senate would pass it and send it to the House whereupon passage, it would go straight to the president’s desk – completely bypassing conference. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

By cutting out conference, this single-bullet scenario eliminates weeks of expected wrangling and would make it possible to pass a bill by the Thanksgiving target so many Democrats are aiming for. Many insiders agree that a conference committee would make that goal next to impossible.

The Democrats are raping the Congressional process to pass ObamaCare:

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The unsatisfied quenching of the Dem thirst for health care reform continued as the Senate Finance Committee received their vapor score for their vapor bill which had the net effect of discrediting the Congressional Budget Office. U.S. Rep. Shadegg renamed CBO the Cooked Books Office with a stinging post (as in, that’s gotta hurt):

Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling weighed in yesterday with his “Where’s the Health Bill?” post in Human Events:

As you read this, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and officials of the Obama administration are in a room at the Capitol rewriting health care policy. The American people aren’t invited. Only a few lobbyists, Obama czars and liberal Senators have even been allowed to see this bill.

The Senate is keeping this bill a secret because politicians were shaken by the August town hall meetings and the rage expressed by the American people toward the president’s version of health care reform. So, to minimize complaints now, the administration and Sen. Reid are making sure citizens are shut out of the process.

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The MSM would like the American public to believe that the Senate Finance Committee bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. After all, WaPo, the NYT and the WSJ reported:

WaPo: “The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade.”

NYT: “The budget office analyzed the bill … its newly projected cost — $829 billion over 10 years.”

WSJ: “The latest Senate health bill will cost $829 billion over a decade.”

But it is a score of a vapor bill — a bill that has no legislative language — and so with much fanfare and pomp the CBO has delivered a Vapor Score of a Vapor Bill. CBO has stated publicly and repeatedly that it cannot accurately score any bill without the legislative language — which does not exist so CBO cannot have it.

Heritage tagged this correctly its Bait and Switch blog:

As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”

And here is a thought from Ryan Ellis at ATR, the reason the latest ObamaCare bill scores so low is because of all the taxes. Here is the list.

For a more wonky analysis of the Vapor Score, see the blog by Donald Marron, a former CBO economist here, and from which the quotes from the MSM above were taken.

Republicans have been living by the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers and some say the GOP now must die by those numbers.

Not so fast. Above the fold on page one of the Wall Street Journal today is this article that “New Math Boosts Health Plan.” What new math?

The CBO has released numbers on the Senate’s health care plan — never mind that the legislation remains mostly in vapors and key details will not be released until it is too late for a new CBO score. In any event, the CBO projects the Senate health care plan will cost more, but will lower the deficit.

How can a plan go from $774 billion over ten years to $829 billion over ten years and lower the deficit? Exactly in ways Barack Obama said would not happen.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the sweeping measure will cover 94% of nonelderly legal U.S. residents, up from about 83% currently. The bill will cut the deficit by $81 billion over the 10-year period, owing to trims in Medicare spending and new taxes.

What? They’re going to cut Medicare and raise taxes? How can that be?

According to Barack Obama in his speech to Congress last month, “The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes. And if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year — one-tenth of 1 percent — it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.” But the Wall Street Journal tells us

Most of the bill’s funding comes from $404 billion in cuts to Medicare and other government insurance programs that Democrats say will reduce waste but won’t hurt recipients’ benefits. An additional $201 billion comes from a 40% excise tax on particularly generous health-insurance plans levied on insurers. The rest comes from annual fees on insurers, medical-device makers and pharmaceutical companies, as well as a series of other changes to the tax treatment of health expenses.

Those fees are actually taxes — like a tax on breast pumps for nursing moms, etc.

Then there is the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in Medicare. One must first wonder why the Democrats are waiting until now to take care of it. One must then wonder if Nancy Ann DeParle, the women charged with rooting out the waste, fraud, and abuse will be up to the job, considering she has failed every time she tried and then lined her pocket in the private sector by capitalizing on her failure.

A direct result of Barack Obama being elected President and the Democrats take over of Congress is that the U.S. the deficit has grown to a record $1.4 Trillion. From AP:

The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday.

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For those who have problems with John Cornyn personally, as opposed to the NRSC operation, I want you to take particular note of this story. He’s doing good work and we need to support him despite differences on the side.

Today the Senate voted, by voice vote, on an amendment by Senator Debbie Stabenow. Keep in mind that Senator Stabenow offered just one amendment to the healthcare legislation.

The Congressional Budget Office, rushing to keep up with the Senate’s aggressive schedule on passing health care legislation, scored the one amendment.

There was a voice vote. Senator Stabenow’s amendment passed.

Only after the amendment passed did the Congressional Budget Office realize it made a mistake in the scoring and under counted the one amendment to the tune of $600 million.

It took Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) to point it out. And now he is offering an amendment of his own to make sure this does not happen again. According to Senator Cornyn, his “amendment requires that before the Finance Committee votes on any amendment to America‘s Healthy Future Act of 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Tax Committee scoring estimates of such amendment must be publicly available and posted on their respective websites for at least 24 hours before any vote.”

We need to support him and the Senate should pass his amendment. $600 million may be chump change to the Democrats, but for the rest of us, it is real money.

We now have a pattern on our hands. When the math behind Barack Obama’s health care plans doesn’t work, Obama attacks math. Now, he doesn’t do it directly. He gets Peter Orzsag to debase his intellect for Obama’s political ends. First, he did it with the IMF score. Then this week he pressured the CBO scorers early this week after their math provided defeat after defeat to his healthcare dreams. And then this weekend, Orzsag has attacked Doug Elmendorf, the CBO director.

Read on for all the examples…

Note to historians, the following is a list of strange consequences from Obama’s self-destructive health care reform obsession:

i) Spooked the conservative Democrats who are disrupting the Committee on Energy and Commerce markup and pending floor vote because of their policy concerns about the government option;
ii) telegraphed to the moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats that President Obama agrees with Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Chris Dodd and Chairman Waxman, in general, about the role of government in health care, making the plan an easy target for opponents;

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